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Prose & Poetry - Ford Madox Ford

Ford Hermann Hueffer, who changed his named in
1919 to Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), was born in 1873 in Surrey, and was
educated at University College School, London.

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The son of The Times music critic, Dr Francis
Hueffer he published his first book at the age of 18 in 1891, The Brown
Owl, which was followed by The Shifting of Fire in 1892.
Collaborating with Joseph Conrad, the pair wrote The Inheritors
(1901) and Romance (1903).

Ford began his famous trilogy The
Fifth Queen in 1906 (completed in 1908), the story of Catherine Howard,
fifth wife of Henry VIII. In 1908 he founded the English Review,
publishing the works of Hardy, Wells and D. H. Lawrence; he lost control of
the magazine in 1910.

After leaving his first wife, Elsie
Martindale whom he married in 1894, and refusing to pay her an allowance for
their two children, in 1910 Ford served a brief sentence of eight days in
Brixton prison.

With the outbreak of war in 1914,
Ford was recruited by
Charles Masterman, head of the War Propaganda Bureau;
Ford wrote pamphlets attacking German literature, art and music, as well as
British pacifists. He subsequently joined a Welsh infantry regiment in
Flanders in 1916 as lieutenant; he was
gassed in France.

He is chiefly remembered today for
his series of war novels which he began in 1915 with the publication of
The Good Soldier, still considered by many as his finest work, and which
continued after the war with a series of four novels detailing the career of
Christopher Tietjens (published from 1924-28).

Ford also published several volumes
of autobiography, including Return to Yesterday (1931) and It was
the Nightingale (1933).